by Mark Tufo
Chapter Twenty – Azile
The wind whipped past Azile. She was somehow colder now that Mike had left. In the distance she could just make out the sounds of men preparing machinery for battle. They would soon be launching missiles, attempting to break the backs of the people of Talboton. She could not allow it. This was the only place that had a chance against Xavier and the cruel mightiness of his army.
She could hardly believe that she was going to break her promise to Michael before he was even completely out of her sight. She stepped over the wall in front of her and to the ground, ten feet below, landing as if she had not dropped from more than the curb onto a street. Her feet never touched the ground as an unseen force propelled her forward. She kept her arms crossed in front of her chest, but it did little to keep out the chill that was pervading her being. Try as she might, she could not discover the source of this menacing feeling.
Azile had covered the majority of the cleared field without being spotted, her blood red cape blending in with the approaching darkness more than it had a right to. She was moving fast atop the ground. A lone sentry bored with a duty he figured would see no action had not the time to sound the alarm as Azile floated to him. His throat had closed involuntarily and his legs, which had worked fine moments earlier, were rooted to the ground as if they’d been planted there. Azile slid past, dragging a blade across his exposed throat, laying open his windpipe. Blood flooded his lungs before he fell to the ground soundlessly.
Azile had been spotted just as her hand touched the dried timber of the middle catapult, a spark smaller than the head of a pin leaping from her outstretched fingers to the wood. The spark immediately multiplied and began to run along the length of the crossbeam. It looked like party lights had been strung along it for effect. More and more of the miniature embers moved along the entire frame of the structure, glowing in iridescent blues and purples before exploding into a conflagration of flame.
Tendrils formed along the sides, extending out, looking for more fuel to fan its feeding frenzy. Men and horses became victims as the fiery fingers reached and emblazoned all they came in contact with. Azile watched as her pyrotechnics sought and found the other two war machines, reducing them to ashes in minutes. Men ran in all directions to get away from the blistering heat the flames produced. Those too slow had sores form on their skin moments before they also burst into flame as if they were incendiary devices. When Azile was confident the catapults would no longer be a threat, she turned to head back to Talboton. She was already dangerously taxed, and this stunt had drained her even deeper. Before long, she would be able to watch as her soul was pulled apart like old frayed cloth.
Azile had been going back to rejoin Michael at the tunnel when she saw men running from the woods to her right, not away from the fire, but towards it, as if they were moth-men drawn to the savage pillars of flame. Those first few seemed confused. It was as more came out that she saw shock and terror etched on their faces. They had seen things they could never burn free from their memories. Following after them were those covered in sprays of blood, some with weeping wounds, others dragging a fallen friend or a wounded appendage.
“What has happened here?” Azile asked as she moved to their point of exit from the woods.
She was on the small, hidden trail that led to the underground passage when she saw a lone figure standing in the middle of the pathway. His back was to her, but he turned when he heard her brushing up against the surrounding fauna. It was Jangrut. He carried a curved blade, which hung by his side. He seemed to have nearly forgotten he was carrying it. His face had been drained of all blood, clearly outlining all the veins and vessels that pulsed just below the surface. Azile did not believe he had even noticed her as she approached.
“I am done with this,” he told her as he tossed his blade to the ground, where his knees closely followed. “Please grant us mercy,” he begged of her, his hands outstretched but not quite willing to touch the hem of her cloak.
“What has happened here?”
“Hell has opened its gates.” He was weeping. “Something has stepped through that accursed portal that has no right to be among us.”
“Michael,” Azile said in alarm.
“I will leave this place if you will allow it, never to return again. I swear it, I swear it on all that is sacred to me.”
His words fell on deaf ears as Azile raced for the trap door. She was on the small landing watching a figure that could have been Mike staring down Bailey who was getting ready to shoot her rifle. Fear radiated off of her, intermingling with the malice that emanated from Mike. His shoulders were heaving with exertion, his back hunched in preparation for attack. His hand axe was rising almost imperceptibly.
“Mi—” Her first attempt to say his name fell short.
She feared she was seeing the demon that had erupted from the bowels of the earth, just like Jangrut had claimed to see. She repeated his name, this time loud enough to gain its…his attention. He pivoted to look at her. She gasped when she saw that not much was recognizable on that mask of hate he wore. With the last of her strength, she pulled open the minutest of slivers that shielded man from Heaven. The blinding white light washed around, over, and through him. He was as see through as a sheet of glass to that all-knowing light. The weight of the reflection was more than he could bear as it drove him to the ground.
“Help me, Bailey,” Azile said as she reached out to the wall before she folded in on herself.
Bailey did not feel comfortable with anything she had just witnessed and was hesitant to get nearer to Mike or Azile for that matter. She did so, but skirted Mike as much as the confines would allow. Bailey helped Azile to stand and steadied her.
“Are you better?”
“Getting there.”
“What is going on?”
“I think Michael has hastened the conclusion of this battle.”
“And the light? I wanted to simultaneously weep forever and laugh until the end of time. How am I not blind?”
“You have seen a glimpse of something few living have ever gazed upon.” Azile did not elaborate. “Get your men to bring Michael out into the forest. I will be waiting.” Azile once again placed her hand to the cement stones to steady her exit.
Chapter Twenty-One – Mike Journal Entry 12
Azile had pulled back the veil. I don’t know how she did it. I only know why. Without the moorings of a soul, I had gone adrift, far over the edge I had sailed, nearly entrapped in that abyss I’d fallen into. It was the light that showed just how far I’d gone. Coming back had taken hours, if the approaching dawn was any indication. I was laid out in a small clearing on my back, stones roughly the size of baseballs in a circle completely around me. What looked like salt lined the entire ring. A large, black bird had hopped onto one of those stones and was cocking its head back and forth to look at me. One eye was the color of pitch, the other white as snow. It was unnerving; I could not get the feeling out of my head that through each eye the beast saw that half of me. On one side, the evil that had permeated throughout my entire being, and the other, the core of good from which I’d be hewn.
Which did it find more dominant?
He cawed loudly before taking flight. I looked at my hands. They were a slight red color; not from discoloration of blood residue, but from a healthy scrubbing I had apparently received at some time during the night. My clothes were gone, and in their place were the more traditional garb of the day, which were about as comfortable to wear as fine-grit sandpaper. I sat up entirely too fast, my head spinning on its own particular axis. I thought I was in the throes of a hallucination as I saw Azile coming down the pathway to me. Her feet never touching the ground, she glided like a specter. She had shed her traditional red coloring for a soft blue. Flowers of yellow braided in her hair. A ringlet of green leaves encircled her head.
Panic welled up in me. I had killed her, and now her disembodiment had come down to tell me of my transgression. I hung my head in shame.
“I’m so sorry, Azile.”
“For what, Michael?” I saw her small, shoeless feet glide impossibly over the small rock wall. She reached down and touched my face as her feet touched ground. She knelt by my side.
“You’re real?” I asked as I reached to touch the hand she still had on my face.
“You were in more danger of leaving this plane than I was last night.”
The prior events flooded back with an unwanted attention to detail.
“What have I done?”
“You’ve stopped a war.”
It took long seconds for those words to gain recognition within my shattered mind. Azile was beaming down on me. How could she? How could she have been a witness to what I did and still feel that way?
“Jangrut has taken his men and fled. I expect the rest will do the same sometime this afternoon. It’s over. You’ve saved Talboton and countless lives on both sides.”
“I saved lives?” I questioned with sarcasm, remembering those individuals I had hacked to death.
“War is evil in and of itself. You did what needed to be done…what had to be done.”
I could only remember a boy, not much older than my sons had been when the zombies first came as he cried for his mother. I had turned the blade so that the heavy hammer part struck the side of his jaw, sending teeth and bone fragments into the wall behind him. I’d shredded the skin and broken his jaw completely off. He sobbed with his mouth hanging impossibly wide now that the lower part of his mouth was no longer hinged to the top. I brought the hammer side down again, this time atop his skull, driving the steel through his memories, his hopes, his desires. His arms and legs shook violently as the electrical signal from brain to appendages was scrambled.
“It could have been done another way.” I was trying my best to move away from my present imagery. I didn’t necessarily mean from killing, just the way in which it had been doled out. “Thank you for helping me. I don’t know that I would have been able to prevent myself from attacking Bailey.” Just one more thing in a long line of things I needed to feel ashamed for. Would Bailey even want to be near me again?
“You should not doubt your own resolve. You would have stopped.”
I said nothing to Azile, but I was not so sure. I wanted to kill Bailey, well, anybody really and everybody because I could. That was the only reasoning—to kill because I could. I shuddered. I think even mass murderers had more reason, like maybe their momma didn’t love them enough or they’d maybe seen it in a video game. Sending spirits on their journey was my only incentive, and I had enjoyed it.
“Stop, Michael. Just stop. I can just about hear your thoughts spiraling down into oblivion. You were swept up in a battle; you are not the first to have done so. No matter the amount of death in that hallway, you saved more lives than you know.”
“There was another battle in a corridor a long time ago. I was with Tommy. I miss him. I miss everyone I’ve lost.” I placed my face in my hands and sobbed. My feelings had swung completely from rage to sorrow. I was lost, the type of lost that no map or heavy doses of lithium could cure. It was that overwhelming anxious feeling of not knowing how to return back to a position of normal.
Once upon a time I had been placed on Tramadol, which was a non-narcotic pain medication for a shoulder issue I was having. It messed with serotonin levels or something. Didn’t think much about it, though. How many of you have actually read the warnings about your medication or the risks of drug interactions? Well, about a week after getting on the Tramadol I got a little sick, so I took some Nyquil, the preferred medication for all those unwilling to deal with their symptoms and just want to sleep. Who fucking knew pseudoephedrine interacted with Tramadol? Not this guy, I can tell you that. Within minutes of taking the Nyquil, I had thrown my mind into a tailspin. I didn’t know which way was up and not in a good way. I would go from panic attack to anxiety and depression and then back again. A piece of me—a small, normal piece—was able to sit on the sidelines and wonder what the fuck was going on and why couldn’t we right this wayward ship? It took hours before opening up the gun case didn’t seem like a good idea. Do you know how fucking scary that is? This was how I was feeling right now, and I didn’t have a bad mixture of drugs in my system to blame it on. For all I knew this could become my new baseline of normal and if that was the case, nobody, including myself, would want to be around me.
I alternated that day from crying, to lying in the fetal position and hitching, to flat out yelling and then sleeping. It was nighttime when I woke up, a small fire by my side. Azile was nowhere to be found. She’d left some dried beef and some water, the latter of which I drank heavily. My throat felt like I’d been wandering the desert for a week, trying to eat sand as a substitute for liquids. I had to think on it a moment as to why my body was so sore. I stood before pulling up my shirt. I was crisscrossed with a myriad of punctures, scrapes, scratches and the bruising of blunt trauma. It was the desperate strikes of the damned before I sent them on their way. There wasn’t any more than a couple of square inches on my body that hadn’t suffered some sort of ordeal. I pulled the front of my pants out a little just to, umm, you know, check and make sure the equipment was fine.
“I see you’re feeling better.”
I immediately let go. Damn pants nearly fell to the ground, I had to grab them quickly before that happened. “Really, this is when you stroll on by?”
“I would have come sooner but I just got back from the surrendering ceremony.”
I arched an eyebrow. “I’m sorry I missed it.”
“It was better that you weren’t there.”
“I can understand that. Jangrut?”
“He wasn’t there as well.”
“So now what?”
“What do you mean?”
“They just gave up. Is there any sort of retribution on their part? You can’t just start a war and then, when you lose, go home as if nothing happened. You should lose something, land, money, something.”
“I do not believe Talboton is in the business of expanding its empire.”
“Don’t patronize me, you know what I mean.”
“No, I’m sorry, you’re right. They will all be required to pay a tithe for the next ten years that will be used to help the families of the victims who were killed or injured.”
“It’s something I suppose.”
“What would you have them do?”
“Gold or trinkets aren’t going to bring loved ones back,” I said sourly. I was referring to the loss of Talboton citizens as much as I was referring to those families I had torn asunder. “I feel like we just played the warm-up game for what’s really coming.” I looked up, noticing we’d passed the cycle of another full moon. Would we be lucky enough to do so again? And what of Mathieu how had his night gone?
Chapter Twenty-Two – Mike Journal Entry 13
I’m not going to lie and say things went back to normal. Things never go back to normal, not after a war. Nations are fundamentally changed; so it was no surprise that Talboton was altered as well. I don’t want to say paranoid, as that seems too strong of a word. Cautious, maybe?
After the burial of her citizens, and the resultant mourning ceremonies, the daily routine began to impose itself. Life continued, as that was the natural order of things. However, now there was a bigger push to train everyone in town on basic defense. Guards were doubled on the walls, and the walls themselves were repaired and bolstered. A lot of the materials used for this were taken from the combatants. They’d even had the audacity to request they get to take them with! Azile questioned their desire to relent, and they’d left with no further incident, leaving sheets of metal and more war machines that they’d been working on.
Azile had shuddered when she saw the heavily pitted and rusted cannon. To her, it looked like it would blow apart when the first charge was put through it. If not, the damage it would have wrought to the town would have been irreparable. Lana had sought and was granted asylum. Denar
th had sent an envoy a week later, at first demanding her return, and then an entreaty to Lana herself, who had declined in person.
Azile had about blown a gasket when the representative from Denarth had talked about how this was straining the relationship between the two townships. She had railed at him that there was no relationship and that Denarth should be groveling at Talboton’s feet for forgiveness before the Lycan came and consumed their town, or possibly even something worse was sent. She’d looked over to me at that point. I’d been sitting as far from the proceedings as possible. It seems that, after my slaughtering of the enemy, not many wanted much to do with me—save Mathieu and Azile.
Berriman, the representative, had almost swallowed his Adam’s apple when she made the threat. He cautiously sent a quick glance my way, cleared his throat, and then offered his apologies to Azile, stating that Lana’s father merely wanted his daughter back.
“I will come home when and if I desire,” Lana had told him in no uncertain terms.
Bailey and I were on shaky ground; she could not forget the way I had looked upon her. This was no cross word spoken during a heated argument or a perceived slight on her part. I had quite literally stared at her with murderous intent and would have followed through with it, not if the chance had presented itself because it had, but rather if I had not been interrupted. She was appreciative for what I had done for the town, as were the rest of the inhabitants. But now, I got the distinct impression that they wished I would take my good deed and go elsewhere. More than once I’d told Azile that was exactly what I wanted to do, and more than once she’d told me that the war was far from over.
“The war will never be over.”
She’d furrowed her eyebrows. “Are you going all philosophical on me, Michael?”
“Of course I am. There will always be another fight, and while I’m trapped here, I’ll never be able to find Oggie…or at least what happened to him.”